Despair's Last Journey. By D. Christie Murray. (Chatto and Windue
63.)—Mr. Christie Murray gives fair warning in his title that he, at any rate, has no intention of cheering his readers. His book is a clever study of a man whose life is wrecked by sheer ill-luck, but the story is told in the most disillusioning manner possible. An introduction is provided which shows the unfortunate hero at the end of his life's Listory,—beaten on every side, inhabiting a tent in the Rocky Mountains, and attended by the spirit of his dead father, in the shape of an inward voice. It is trying enough to be assured at the leginning of a long book that everything i3 going to end as badly as possible. But Mr. Christie Murray is not satisfied with this. He puts the whole solid twenty-nine chapters of the story proper in the form of a vision of his past life passing before the "mind's eye" of the hero. And lest the reader should hope at certain moments that things are going a little better, the author brings him up sharp every now and then with a few sentences about the "Solitary " and his "Voice." This sort of thing is not gay at all, and the conscientious reader will be too depressed by the time he gets to the end of the book to find much consola- tion in the fact that after the unfortunate hero had narrowly escaped being roasted in a forest fire, the Voice murmured to the Solitary that Duty was left to him, whereon the latter" renounced his own despair."
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